Lee Ranaldo Quotes

Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.

When Soundgarden formed, we were post-punk - pretty quirky.

Obviously, Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years, and I love all those guys dearly.

I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.

We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth's noise.

Sonic Youth is one of my favorite bands.

I was real into Devo, Pavement, Captain Beefheart, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

A lot of power-pop comes out of LA, a lot of speed metal comes out of New York.

When I was little, people like Talking Heads were on the radio. There was something geeky yet groundbreaking about them.

Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people's perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition - and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.

Sonic Youth played one show before we even had a drummer. It was just me, Kim, and Thurston. The lights slowly went down, and the set was just 30 minutes of feedback.

If I had a good scream, like Frank Black, I'd be doing punk music, 'cos I love that.

I started making music with my band in the '80s, so I am more product of post punk than classical music, and I have always carried on this way.

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.

I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.

I listen to Nine Inch Nails, Green Day, U2, and it becomes part of me, comes out in my music. Wherever it goes, there will always be the fabric of New Orleans in it.

The Replacements don't sound like The Replacements half the time!

I don't know if Kim Gordon does collaborations but I'd love to work with her on something one day.

There would not be Skaters or Emeralds or any of these bands if it weren't for Double Leopards.

By the time Sonic Youth formed in 1981, my musical tastes had left the Dead behind, but I was always very proud of the fact that we had three different singers singing individually from different points of view, like the Dead.

Eric's Trip is still a huge influence on me. The style of those recordings and the rawness of them is very inspiring. And the density of the distorted parts, amazing.

The lion's share of what I listened to in the Eighties, what really affected me, was coming from Britain.

The early music I heard was Top of the Pops. But in bedrooms, around the house with my brother playing the Sex Pistols, Sham 69 and the Ham and all these groups then going into that sort of mod turnover scene and then going into the New Romantics scene the coming of age myself in the mid-eighties and into the noughties, it was changing.

I mean, you could have said Elvis Presley was new wave when it happened. I heard Willy DeVille and Tom Petty and to me they were new wave really because they were new.

I was doing the Klaus Schulze noise-kid thing before it became interesting to people.